We must here caution the reader against the supposition that music at this particular time leaped suddenly forward. The tendencies that we have been speaking of were latent long before Philip Emanuel Bach appeared, and there was no strict line of demarcation where one kind of music stopped and another began. Organic development never progresses in that way; each phase of it begins slowly, becomes eventually operative, and dies as slowly as it began. And there were other composers working at that time on the same problems; composers who were of considerable importance then, but whose names are now forgotten.
_Philip Emanuel Bach: Piano Sonata_[23] _in F-Minor, First Movement._
This Sonata has three movements: 1. Fast (Allegro assai); 2. Slow (Andante cantabile); 3. Slow (Andantino grazioso). The third of these is marked "attacca" to indicate that the usual pause between the movements is to be omitted. In the second and third movements the themes themselves and their treatment reveal the tentative nature of Bach's efforts. Each of these themes is over-embellished; each has something of the vagueness usual in piano music of his time, and yet there is a distinct tendency towards definite, strophic melody such as is common in the sonatas of Haydn and Mozart.
But the first movement of this sonata of Philip Emanuel Bach's is quite remarkable. Its theme is definite, its phraseology clear and concise, and its form well rounded. In fact a comparison of the opening measures with those of the theme from Beethoven's first sonata will reveal a decided similarity. Beethoven's theme is constructed from a figure or phrase, ascending like an arpeggio higher and higher, until a climax is reached, after which the melody dies down to a pause or half cadence on the dominant chord. This is precisely what happens with the theme of Philip Emanuel Bach, although the second half of the theme is more regular than Beethoven's, the complete melody being in what might be called "verse form," each two-measure phrase corresponding to a line of verse.
More important still, however, is the quality of the melody itself. It is distinctly in the style suitable for the piano; there is no evidence of the old song melody, nor of polyphonic phraseology, nor of dance tunes. This is, in short, one of the earliest examples of pure pianoforte music, using the term in a modern sense. Another interesting point in this movement is the presence of two contrasting themes in the Exposition. "The principle of alternately stating two contrasting themes, which found its ultimate expression in the successive presentation of first and second subjects, had been familiar to the musical world as long as minuets and trios, gavottes, musettes, and the like, had been in vogue, but the process by which the two subjects are allowed to be interwoven with each other, or to generate, as it were, new material having its origin in something that has gone before, opened out a world of fresh possibilities to the composers of the later times, and gave them opportunities which had been altogether withheld from Bach and his contemporaries." "Oxford History of Music," Vol. IV, p. 141. The two themes constitute the material out of which the whole movement grows or germinates, so that they somewhat resemble characters in a story, and this analogy is further carried out in the quality of the themes themselves, the first being usually vigorous and to a certain degree non-lyric, while the second is lyric and more sentimental; as if one were masculine and the other feminine.